Brand Bubble – John Gerzema and Ed Lebar (By Patrick Collister)
Gerzema and Lebar both work for Y&R and the book is a plug for Y&R’s BrandAsset Valuator, alias BAV. In short, the book argues that consumer “top-of-mind awareness, trust, regard and admiration for not a few but thousands of brands” are dropping. And “in essence, they’re concentrating their passion, devotion and purchasing power on an increasingly smaller portfolio of special brands.” This, they write, is a big problem taking shape. “In 2006 Fortune magazine conducted a survey indicating that 72% of the Dow Jones Market Cap is now intangible. Accenture estimated that intangibles accounted for almost 70% of the value of the S&P 500 in 2007, up from 20% in 1980.”
In other words, brands are of increasing value to stock markets at a time when most are of diminishing value to consumers. The Henley Centre has studied the erosion of brands and in 2007 the Carlson Marketing Group found “in 2000, four in ten consumers showed a genuine preference for…one brand, but that dropped to one in three consumers in 2001 and crashed further in 2007 to less than one in ten consumers feeling committed to a single brand.”
One reason: there’s too much advertising.
James Surowiecki in “Decline of Brands” wrote in 2004: The average American sees 60% more ad messages per day than when the first President Bush left office.”
It’s not that consumers are exhausted by it but that “Brands have blurred into a sea of sameness.” Choice has become overwhelming. So, 160 million phone numbers in the US are on the “do not call” list; 43.6 million households have some form of PVR to edit out the ads.
Furthermore, and crucially, most advertising today is dull and uninteresting because, as the authors put it, “many companies confuse risk avoidance with risk management.” Today, people want to see brands being courageous. They want brands to stand for something other than just making the directors filthy rich.
Wossy Book Club
There are two reasons that I liked what I read about the Wossy book club – started by Jonathan Ross on twitter, apparently as a response to the end of Richard and Judy`s (in)famous book club – the first being the new and clever use of twitter, and the second being the innovative response of publishers Pan Macmillan.
The announcement of #wossybookclub, and the naming of Men Who Stare At Goats as the first featured book have resulted in:
Macmillan allowed free access to the ebook for one hour on the site Exact Editions, as well as a preview of the first chapter which is still available.
I did not attend the book club – which has now had its second week I believe – and have no idea how well twitter could facilitate any kind of sensible discussion, but I thought it was brilliant that (according to netimperative) twitterers were able to reference their tweets with links to individual pages of the book.
This is a real nice example of how a simple idea can make huge waves through social media (though in this case it did rely on a high-profile name), and of how a business can respond quickly to offer people something for free to facilitate a movement that is sure to benefit them hugely.